Thomas Hardy’s relentlessly depressing short story “The Melancholy Hussar of the German Legion” is a fierce and emphatic rejection of the theory that free will actually exists in human society. The imagery that opens the story seems detached and unrelated to the narrative: “Here stretch the downs, high and breezy and green, absolutely unchanged since those eventful days.” The first-person narrator then proceeds to inform the reader that the story about to told took place almost a century before. He then reveals that it is a second-hand story told to him by one of the participants who told him the story many years after the events occurred. The opening chapter of the story is thus obsessed with time and within that obsession is implicated the idea that the fundamental foundation of humanity never really changes.
The second chapter continues this obsession as the narrator observes that the generation alive at the time he writes the story likely has “a very dim notion” of what their own little slice of the world was like a century earlier. Specifically, he is referencing their knowledge of the Hussars of the title. The point is that the specifics and the details of the world are in constant flux and change, but human nature evolves at a much slower pace. He notes that at the time the story takes place, for instance, mustaches were rare, implying that in his own time they were much more fashionable.
Uniting the past and the present is the omnipresence of the monarchy in British society. The story taking place in the past is one in which the events are specifically driven by the decision of King George III to encamp in a nearby village. The king becomes the incarnation of the illusion of free will for most people. The events describe are all stimulated by this decision of the king; there is no genuine free will involved because every action is precipitated by the free will of just one person: King George.
The story is a romantic tragedy. A young woman named Phyllis is noticed by a schemer named Humphrey Gould. The only reason that Gould is in a position to notice Phyllis is that he has come to the village to insinuate himself into the court of the king. He then insinuates himself into the good graces of Phyllis’s father who has held in the prison-like seclusion he adopts in his retirement. Phyllis goes for a great length of time without seeing Humphrey who is more engaged in making his way upward among the court and this absence allows enough time for Phyllis to develop a romantic attraction to a German soldier assigned to guard the king. Before long, the homesick soldier is making plans to desert his position and escape back to Germany with Phyllis in tow as a runaway bride. This plan quickly falls apart with the sudden return of Humphrey which instills a sense of honor and loyalty to her fiancé. This fidelity turns out to be a one-way street as Humphrey has in his absence married another girl. Before Phyllis can inform the soldier that she is now fully free to go with him, his escape boat gets lost in the fog and makes a wrong turn sending him right back to the British coast. Phyllis watches his execution for desertion in horror.
On the surface, this chain of events sounds almost absurdly manufactured strictly for the point of having a tragic ending. Taken one by one, however, even of the events is perfectly believable. Phyllis is hardly a young girl, and her availability is due to the control of her dominant father who forces her to be as reclusive as he is. Humphrey only proposes to Phyllis because he is himself under pressure from his father to marry a “worthy” bride. The German soldier is only guarding the British monarch because of the quirk of history which introduced Germanic blood into the royal lineage. And, of course, mother nature is always ready to mess interrupt the best laid plans of homesick soldiers looking to desert their post.
The narrator ends his telling of the story that Phyllis related to him with the posthumous information that she lies buried in a grave near to what in which the body of her beloved German soldier molders in the ground. She never married and died unloved for reasons over which she exercised literally no control. In fact, the only character in the story who is completely control of his actions and destiny is King George III. And, as history proves, even that exercise of free will turned out to be severely limited.
